While this included such basic needs as eating three square meals a day and answering the call of nature, it wasn't as banal as it might sound.

The eponymous Sims were fascinating beings, oozing personality and representing a giant leap for artificial intelligence in PC gaming at the turn of the millennium.

There was rarely a dull moment watching your characters' lives unfold and seeing them encounter the same trials and tribulations that we face every day, plus hearing them babble away in their native tongue of Simlish was always endearing.

Sims had to be instructed to carry out tasks like get washed, exercise and learn new skills, but they also had a degree of free will, unless the player chose to deny them it in the options menu.

Watching on as they autonomously interacted with other characters, striking up friendships, relationships and rivalries was among the highlights on offer in this infinitely re-playable game.

Like its sequels, the game was applauded over the diverse range of relationships on offer, with players given the option to strike up same-sex relationships, a feature that has sadly never sat well in countries such as Russia.

Although The Sims was open-ended in the sense that there was no ultimate goal, characters could be killed off through starvation, drowning, fires and electrocution, or pack their virtual bags and leave the game if they were chronically unhappy.

Sim City's building and book-balancing wasn't jettisoned entirely, as players could remodel and furnish a customised suburban home for their Sims via Build Mode and Buy Mode.

The in-game architecture system was highly sophisticated, and this comes as no surprise given that Wright and his team originally envisioned the title as a house-building simulation.

'Livin' Large' was the first add-on to drop in August 2000, and it was followed by six others over the course of three years, each adding new items, characters, skins and features.

The Sims' phenomenal success on PC paved the way for the game to be ported to consoles, with developer Edge of Reality charged with tailoring it for PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube.

The game survived the conversion process well, so much so that the console market received new installments in the series for years to come, but the PC edition was always the definitive version.

The Sims has spawned dozens of sequels, ports and remakes during its 14-year lifespan, and although its core entries have grown ever sophisticated, the 2000 original will always have historic significance.

With The Sims 4 due to touch down on PC less than two months from now, fans of the series can look forward to the new installment safe in the knowledge that the underlying framework that made the original a classic appears to be firmly in place.